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Firefox 10 and bye bye Flash

Firefox 10 beta 6 was released on last week and with the final release coming soon it was time to have a closer look at Firefox 10. I must say that this is a release worth installing like Firefox 5 was with decent HTML5 video support. But what makes Firefox 10 different then previous releases? Then answer is simple, WebGL. WebGL is a way to do 3D programming and rendering directly from within JavaScript.

With Firefox 10 WebGL works and there for also Google Street View works without the need of Flash. Yes, another dependency on Flash has been removed. The previous major dependency was YouTube, but as some may have noticed they also are in a transition from Flash to HTML5 video where you get the HTML5 variant when Flash doesn’t work.

As more and more websites switch from a Flash-player for video toward HTML5 in under a year it makes you wonder what WebGL is going to change. Was HTML5 a year ago only for the geeks and cutting edge, now more and more starts to depend on it. With HTML5 Canvas a lot of Arcade games where rewritten to run in a webbrowser. With WebGL the question comes when Doom has been rewritten to run in a webbrowser. Maybe something for a Google Summer of Code project?

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Hans Spaans

Unix & security consultant with a passion for Linux, Solaris, PostgreSQL, Perl and network services, but also a strong believer in open and free source, standards and content.
View all posts by Hans Spaans